Redemption Ark

Twenty years in a place like this, he thought. They’d be busy staying alive, yes, but what kind of a life was one of pure struggle for existence? The Jugglers might prove endlessly fascinating, awash with eternally old mysteries of cosmic provenance, or they might not wish to communicate with the humans at all. Although lines of rapport had been established between humans and Pattern Jugglers on the other Juggler worlds, it had sometimes taken decades of study before the key was found to unlock the aliens. Until then, they were little more than sluggish vegetative masses, evidencing the work of intelligence without in any way revealing it themselves. What if this turned out to be the first group of Jugglers that did not wish to drink human neural patterns? It would be a lonely and bleak place to stay, shunned by the very things one had imagined might make it tolerable. Staying with Remontoire, Khouri and Thorn, plunging into the intricate structure of the living neutron star, might begin to seem like the more attractive option.

Well, in twenty years they’d find out whether that had been the case.

Antoinette pushed a mug of green-coloured tea in front of him. ‘Drink up, Clavain.’

He sipped at it, wrinkling his nose against the miasma of pungent, briny fumes that hovered above the drink. ‘What if I’m drinking a Pattern Juggler?’

‘Felka says you won’t be. She should know, I think — I gather she’s been itching to meet these bastards for quite a while, so she knows a thing or two about them.’

Clavain gave the tea another go. ‘Yes, that’s true, isn’t…’

But Felka had gone. She had been in the tent a moment ago, but now she wasn’t.

‘Why does she want to meet them so badly?’ Antoinette asked.

‘Because of what she hopes they’ll give her,’ Clavain said. ‘Once, when she lived on Mars, she was at the core of something very complex — a vast, living machine she had to keep alive with her own willpower and intellect. It was what gave her a reason to live. Then people — my people, as a matter of fact — took the machine away from her. She nearly died then, if she had ever truly been alive. And yet she didn’t. She made it back to something like normal life. But everything that has followed, everything that she has done since, has been a way to find something else that she can use and that will use her in the same way; something so intricate that she can’t understand all its secrets in a single intuitive flash, and something that, in its own way, might be able to exploit her as well.’

‘The Jugglers.’

Still clasping the tea — and it wasn’t so bad, really, he noted — he said, ‘Yes, the Jugglers. Well, I hope she finds what she’s looking for, that’s all.’

Antoinette reached beneath the table and hefted something up from the floor. She placed it between them: a corroded metal cylinder covered in a lacy froth of calcified micro-organisms.

‘This is the beacon. They found it yesterday, a mile down. There must have been a tsunami which washed it into the sea.’

He leaned over and examined the hunk of metal. It was squashed and dented, like an old rations tin that had been stepped on. ‘It could be Conjoiner,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure. There aren’t any markings which have survived.’

‘I thought the code was Conjoiner?’

‘It was: it’s a simple in-system transponder beacon. It’s not meant to be detected over much more than a few hundred million kilometres. But that doesn’t mean it was put here by Conjoiners. Ultras could have stolen it from one of our ships, perhaps. We’ll know a little more when we dismantle it, but that has to be done carefully.’ He rapped the rough metal husk with his knuckles. ‘There is anti-matter in here, or it wouldn’t be transmitting. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a dent in this island if we don’t open it properly.’

‘Rather you than me.’

‘Clavain…’

He looked around; Felka had returned. She looked even wetter than when they had arrived. Her hair was glued to her face in lank ribbons, and the black fabric of her dress was tight against one side of her body. She should have been pale and shivering, by Clavain’s estimation. But she was flushed red, and she looked excited.

‘Clavain,’ she repeated.

He put down the tea. ‘What is it?’

‘You have to come outside and see this.’

He stepped out of the tent. He had warmed up just enough to feel a sudden spike of cold as he did so, but something in Felka’s manner made him ignore it, just as he had long ago learned to selectively suppress pain or discomfort in the heat of battle. It did not matter for now; it could, like most things in life, be dealt with later, or not at all.

Felka was looking out to sea.

‘What is it?’ he asked again.

‘Look. Do you see?’ She stood by him and directed his gaze. ‘Look. Look hard, where the mist thins out.’

‘I’m not sure if—’

‘Now.’